Reddit’s plan to “contain” hate is so backwards that Reddit bigots are begging to be “contained”

Earlier this week, Reddit announced a perplexing new plan to “contain” the worst bigots on the site. Instead of simply banning the bigots, their subreddits would simply be “reclassified.” Redditors would have to sign into them much as they now sign into the site’s NSFW subreddits, and, presumably to avoid angering advertisers, Reddit would remove all ads from them.

Well, the folks in the 4/chan subreddit (not 4chan itself; the Reddit incarnation of it) want to get into that sweet, sweet ad-free action. So one enterprising channer suggested that they spam a thread with the n-word to prove they’re as hateful as the hateful assholes of r/coontown:

And spam they did. Here’s a portion of the top comment in the thread:

The comment continues on for a time in this fashion.

Other commenters had similar ideas; this one was so relentless I made a half-hearted attempt at censoring it.

You get the idea.

Brilliant move, Reddit admins! You surrendered to the bigots and now they’re walking all over you.

Comments

The amount of traffic a website receives from a blog representing the ideological opposition is trivial. AVFM gets its traffic from repeat visits by MRAs. Mammoth gets its traffic from repeat visits by anti-MRAs. The occasional drive-by from the opposition is just a trickle, especially because most readers at, say, Mammoth will not actually click on a link in the post but will instead rely on the blogger’s description of what the enemy said. Nobody here is putting food on Paul Elam’s table.

A delusion about one’s own power is a common feature of ideological sects. Making a big show of “I’m not linking to the enemy” is a manifestation of that delusion. It is also a signal to fellow sectarians that “I am one of the good people.”

Bonnie, I am not saying that you should “feel dumb” for doing this. I am saying that your belief in the power of your one click represents a delusion of grandeur.

Had to be whined: Then why the fuck do you consider it to be ‘shady’ to use such options in the first place? Either we’re not interrupting their revenue stream, in which case, it’s no big deal if we use them, or we are, in which case it’s effective.

The only reason to drone on about it over several posts is if you:
A> Believe it might impact a site owner’s revenue stream AND
B> Believe that to be a bad thing.

If that’s the case, then you’re a fellow-traveler of sites like AVfM, the subreddits under discussion here, and RooshV, among others. In which case, feel free to fuck off with all the fucks, a side order of fucks with fuck sauce, and a big heaping mound of fuck with fuck sprinkles for dessert.

The amount of traffic a website receives from a blog representing the ideological opposition is trivial. AVFM gets its traffic from repeat visits by MRAs. Mammoth gets its traffic from repeat visits by anti-MRAs. The occasional drive-by from the opposition is just a trickle, especially because most readers at, say, Mammoth will not actually click on a link in the post but will instead rely on the blogger’s description of what the enemy said. Nobody here is putting food on Paul Elam’s table.

This is true. However…

A delusion about one’s own power is a common feature of ideological sects. Making a big show of “I’m not linking to the enemy” is a manifestation of that delusion. It is also a signal to fellow sectarians that “I am one of the good people.”

Bonnie, I am not saying that you should “feel dumb” for doing this. I am saying that your belief in the power of your one click represents a delusion of grandeur.

…this is not.

Nobody here is under the impression that we are responsible for keeping Elam in business. We are not cringing under the realisation that we bear the blame for AVFM continuing to pump out poisonous ideas. The reason we don’t want to give even $0.01’s worth of traffic to him isn’t to do with any feeling of power or grandeur. It’s simply that even $0.01 is still too much. The only acceptable amount of money to give Elam (or Valizadeh, or anyone else) is $0.

I have no delusions of my own grandeur. However, I am also aware that gestures count too. The gesture I choose to make is that I will drive up their web hosting costs very slightly but will not give them the accompanying web traffic bump that pays for that web hosting. Like a raised middle finger, it is not innately powerful but carries a meaning in human terms; and even if Elam does not care about my raised middle finger, I do.

If you want to share the content with lots of people without each one counting as another page view, you need something that will visit the site once and then show everyone the saved copy of it, such as https://archive.is .

There used to be a site that archived Daily Fail articles for this purpose, but it got cease-and-desisted. I don’t know how archive.is reacts to copyright-related takedown notices.

Regarding advertising revenue, it’s my understanding that most banner ads pay the hosting site per click, not per visitor. I just tried to find some concrete info on that and failed, so it might be less common than I thought, but there are definitely advertisers that work that way. Point is that you aren’t necessarily financially supporting AVfM or RoK by merely visiting the sites, although there’s really no way to know for sure without knowing who their ad providers are, and inquiring about how their payments work.

Well, yeah, like I said, it’s for you. It doesn’t make a difference beyond your own feelz, and any belief that it does is just a comforting illusion.

I haz many feelz. What do my feelz tell me? They tell me that I am out of patience. They tell me that you are under the impression that the internet exists as a place for you to heroically leap from site to site, fearlessly pointing out to people the savage truths that lurk beneath the surface of people’s reasoning of which they were unaware, and leaving them sadder but wiser. Nobody was saying the things you’re saying, after all.

What you’re actually doing, at least from my vantage point, is much closer to going up to a conversation about the artistry of Michelangelo’s depiction of David’s ass, and saying “You know, poop comes out of butts.” It’s true that poop comes out of butts, and it’s also true that nobody else was saying it, but that’s not because we didn’t know it. In fact, the reason we didn’t say it is because we assume that everyone knows it already and is speaking of more sublime matters.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am not on this site to be told things I know already or that I can discover from a simple web search. I’m here to learn things.

If you want me to treat you like a five year old – that is, tolerated until you start shouting, at which point you get ejected – please carry on.

Alternatively, if you want to be respected as a fellow adult, please either share with the group a personal experience you’ve had which is germane to the issue; or else tell us something which is interesting and which can’t be learned from simple web searches and wikipedia browsing; or else make us laugh. Any of these things will do.

Nobody here is under the impression that we are responsible for keeping Elam in business. We are not cringing under the realisation that we bear the blame for AVFM continuing to pump out poisonous ideas. The reason we don’t want to give even $0.01’s worth of traffic to him isn’t to do with any feeling of power or grandeur. It’s simply that even $0.01 is still too much. The only acceptable amount of money to give Elam (or Valizadeh, or anyone else) is $0.

I have no delusions of my own grandeur. However, I am also aware that gestures count too. The gesture I choose to make is that I will drive up their web hosting costs very slightly but will not give them the accompanying web traffic bump that pays for that web hosting. Like a raised middle finger, it is not innately powerful but carries a meaning in human terms; and even if Elam does not care about my raised middle finger, I do.

Two things to add:

1. We are also very much aware that asshats like Paul Elam or Janet Buttface put out deliberately offensive content with the hopes of getting traffic (Janet literally admitted that this was her ‘strategy’ on twitter) because the whole “negative attention is still attention” thing. Donotlink allows us to expose their misogyny without giving them the attention they so desperately crave.

2. Have you seen what MRAs talk about this blog? It drives them livid that we use donotlink, they feel personally offended that David takes the trouble to link their vile crap through DoNotLink. And that, as they say, is fucking hilarious. XD

Case in point: “had to be said”, the most obvious concern-troll ever, is trying to convince us not to use donotlink. It’s pretty easy to see why.

Alan,
I’m a regular at Gawker and holy shit is it ever a clusterfuck right now. I’m kind of glad this mess coincided with work + a power outage for a couple of days that is keeping me from internetting too much. It’ll be curious to see what happens when the dust settles.

Have you seen what MRAs talk about this blog? It drives them livid that we use donotlink, they feel personally offended that David takes the trouble to link their vile crap through DoNotLink.

Oooo, I didn’t know that, but it explains a lot!

DoNotLink of course gives you the option to vote pages as “Nonsense” or “Harmful” or whatever, and also to see what the most-voted option was. Lately I’ve starting seeing pages where the most-voted option was “Great!”. (I forget which ones. It might have been to Vox Day’s website but I couldn’t swear to that.)

I’d been asking myself, “Why would anyone bother to manipulate a DoNotLink vote?”, and couldn’t think of an answer. But if the MRAs are that worked up about DoNotLink, then I can see why they’d think doing this is a productive use of their time.

The swastika (or a similar symbol rotated in the opposite direction, I can’t recall at the moment) is used in Japan as the symbol for a Shinto shrine on maps.
The swastika had a lot of traditional uses, and some people are angry that the Nazis stole it and want to take it back for traditional things. That is probably a lost cause.

Although their are a number of symbols identical to the Nazi swastika (certain Hindu icons, etc.) it is in fact an original design. Specifically it is a reverse Sigil. The sigil was the runic sunwheel and was a good luck symbol; it rotated clockwise to attract the powers of the light. The Nazis swapped that to attract the powers of darkness.

It’s quite interesting to read up on the Ahnenerbe and the British counter measures (especially Denis Wheatley’s work for SOE)

The swavastika is the counterclockwise symbol. And yeah, the Nazis managed to infuse the swastika with a tremendous amount of evil connotations in a relatively short timeframe. (Aside: the original non-Nazi swastika was not rotated 45 degrees like the Nazi flag symbol.)

Yeah, those trailing arms are supposed to show the way it’s spinning (widdershins for those people who don’t use clocks).

Nazi iconography is an interesting if controversial subject. The colour choices for the flag for instance. Of course, since that Mitchell & Webb sketch (“Heinz, are we the baddies?”) even their Hugo Boss fashions have been nicely undermined.

About the Gawker thing:
I see it as a positive: they were a gossip magasine to start with, and this used to be the sort of content they wanted. But they grew and the bar has been raised since, and their current public and direction don’t find it acceptable anymore. Posting this article was a bad thing, but in the past they wouldn’t have aknowledged it as bad. Any dinosaur wants to quit over it being pulled? They can go, the rest will be better for it.

I’ve seen some commentary that suggests it’s the fact that your not interacting face to face that explains why arseholery is so ubiquitous on the net. I suppose there may be some truth in that. Those of us who grew up before online life soon came to realise that if you acted like a knob you’d get decked.

I am still capable of putting my foot in it of course (as I often demonstrate) but it’s novel that the worst you get in return is a bit of a telling off, and via text too. In essence it’s a consequence free environment now so maybe that explains things.

I think it’s only true to an extent that the anonymity makes people more rude. A lot of people have no problem being rude to people’s faces or saying bigoted things in public. Those are probably the same people who are assholes on the internet. I kind of doubt there are that many people who are wonderful human beings in meat space and have secret lives as assholes online. I think maybe people who are privileged or sheltered think that anonymity causes cruelty because the internet is the only place they really notice how poorly people can treat others. Anyone who belongs to a marginalized group or anyone who works retail and food service and customer service already know that people are assholes everywhere, usually with little to no repercussion.

You’re probably onto something there. I don’t really see a lot of rudeness in real life because of the people I hang out with and the places I frequent. Even when I lived in London the worst I’d encounter would be someone not saying ‘thank you’ when you let them out in traffic or something.

In my world, people are either impeccably well mannered or trying to kill you (surprisingly they’re not mutually exclusive) but rarely boorish.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.